The Man Who Wrote the Book [Hardcover]

Erik Tarloff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 2000

A hilarious, ingeniously conceived, sexy romp of a novel, The Man Who Wrote the Book is another triumph by novelist Erik Tarloff, author of the critically acclaimed national best-seller Face-Time.

Ezra Gordon's life is falling apart. His job as an underpaid literature professor at a small Baptist college in California is in jeopardy because he can't get his act together to write any articles for academic journals, he has a ferocious case of writer's block and hasn't written a poem in years, and he is in a lukewarm relationship with the icily disapproving Carol, daughter of the fearsome college trustee, the  Reverend Dimsdale. And his doctor has just told him that, physically, at the age of 35, it's all downhill from here.  

To escape a dreary spring break on campus, Ezra heads to Los Angeles to visit Isaac Schwimmer, an old college friend. There's nothing wrong with Isaac's life -- he's a fabulously successful publisher of pornographic books, his social life is a bachelor's fantasy, and he lives next door to a Penthouse model as smart as she is beautiful (well, almost). When Isaac proposes that Ezra write a dirty book for a little fast cash, Ezra takes him up on the offer. Little does he know that his book, Every Inch a Lady (by "E.A. Peau") will radically change his life, and throw the campus into chaos.        

The Man Who Wrote the Book, while evoking great academic satires from authors like David Lodge and Kingsley Amis and inviting comparison to Philip Roth's sexy masterpiece Portnoy's Complaint, remains the unique vision of Erik Tarloff. With his singular blend of humor, sharp insight into human relations, and a poignant understanding of the human spirit, Erik has established himself as an engaging, provocative -- and extremely funny -- force in modern American literature.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It takes a bit of doing to create a sad sack ingrate of a protagonist and then actually get readers to root for him. Erik Tarloff's second novel, The Man Who Wrote the Book, concerns a divorced college professor who teaches English lit at a Baptist college near Fresno, California. Ezra Gordon is in the disadvantageous position of being refused tenure by an institution he loathes. His love life isn't so much a wreck as a mere stall--he's lackadaisically dating Carol, a lawyer for the college who, not to put too fine a point on it, won't put out. Driving her home from a date, he muses, "Failed husband, failed father, failed poet, failed scholar, and any minute now, failed lover."

Ezra looks up a former college chum, Isaac Schwimmer, over spring break, and heads down to Los Angeles for an impromptu visit. Isaac, it turns out, is a wildly successful publisher of pornography, and he introduces Ezra to a world of parties, drinking, and easy lovin'. He also introduces him to Tessa, who rates this eye-popping description:

Her skin was the color of a perfectly roasted Thanksgiving turkey, her copious cascading hair the color of butter. Her body was at once so firmly toned and so bounteously voluptuous it seemed to belong to some other, more evolved species of primate than the people he knew; her abs alone were sufficient to force any thinking person to reconsider the eugenic advisability of passing on his own DNA.

Ah, Herr Professor in love. And under the influence of Tessa's tender ministrations, Ezra discovers the one thing he doesn't stink at: writing utterly filthy porn.

Of course, when he returns to his college, his seemingly frigid girlfriend, and his foundering career, Ezra has to reconcile his new self--happy dirty-book writer--with his former self--miserable college professor. The two do find common ground in the end: "Strange how much pleasure he'd found in writing a stupid little dirty book; it had actually reawakened his joy in literature, reminded him why he'd gone to graduate school in the first place." Tarloff has a swell premise here, and this book--like his first, Face-Time--is quickly, thickly plotted. The writing may occasionally think it's more amusing than it really is, and some of the plot never comes home to roost, but it's plenty of fun to witness mopey Ezra endure success. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

The author of Face Time abandons the Beltway and sets his second novel in the seemingly pokier arena of academia. But in this entertaining, whimsical tale, the scholarly existence of literature professor Ezra Gordon is by no means free of chaos and surprises, as sex, secret identities and pornography encroach on and transform his life. The story begins on a downcast note, with Ezra in danger of losing his job at Beuhler, a tiny Baptist college, because he hasn't published articles in his field. His joyless relationship with the daughter of a college trustee is doomed; his doctor tells him he's going "downhill" physically, and he's broke. Depressed, Ezra calls his best friend from grad school, Isaac Schwimmer, who invites him to L.A. Isaac, who's a decadent and wealthy porn publisher, shows Ezra a hedonistic weekend involving rich food, excessive drinking, cigars, saunas and sex with a porn star. Ezra feels recklessly alive, and so when Isaac asks him to write a porn novel and cuts a generous check, Ezra agrees to create a dirty book under the pseudonym E.A. Peau. The book's unexpected success has him scrambling to keep his extracurricular project a secret. Irony increases when he learns that he's now the favorite writer of the unwitting prudes who would deny him tenure; it threatens overload when it's discovered that Peau's zip codes match those of Beuhler College and Ezra is made chairman of the investigative committee. Tarloff's brisk one-liners and graceful choreography of clashing personalities evidence his former occupation as a sitcom scriptwriter and happily contribute to this romp in its surge toward a fairy tale ending. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (May 9, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609604686
• ISBN-13: 978-0609604687
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,856,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five stars, but one flaw...., September 29, 2000

By 

P. Meltzer (Wynnewood, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Man Who Wrote the Book (Hardcover)

I really enjoyed this book and thus was surprised to see all the heavy criticism it received. You know that a book is not going over too well when when only 10% or 20% of the readers find the 5-star reviews helpful, which seemed to be kind of a pattern here. Nothwithstanding all that, I loved this book, and would heartily recommend it, although I wonder if males may go for it more than females. Anyway, before I lavish a little praise on the book (which everyone will disagree with anyway), let me get to the flaw (which I will try to do without giving anything away).

In any novel, virtually by necessity, certain unrealistic things have to happen; things that are not quite right. If nothing unrealistic happened, then nothing would happen at all, and you wouldn't have a story. This pivotal aspect of a novel was well described by the excellent novelist Donald Westlake as follows:

"There are moments in almost any novel when it's necessary to move a character from one position to another, so that you can move on with the story...Once the character is moved into the new position, everything is fine, but in order to make the transition, the writer has to bend somehing out of shape. Some behavior is wrong, some reaction is wrong. It's a rip in the fabric of the novel, but it's necessary to get the story where it has to go...Other writers, reading the book, might notice the lump in the batter, but most readers won't."

The trick in any novel is to try and make this "rip in the fabric" as unnoticable as possible. For me, the biggest rip in the fabric here was in fact a reaction, namely the public reaction to Ezra's work product (and I'm being vague here simply so as not to give anything away for those who haven't read the book, but those who have read the book will know exactly what I mean). That reaction just struck me as totally not credible, namely that such a product would ever, ever work its way into the public consciousness, much less at the speed of the light which this did. It would be one thing if an author was actually trying to be "high-brow low-brow" (like Nabokov's Lolita, Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover or some similar work by a reputable and known author), but Ezra's work (or should we say Isaac's work?) never had such aims for a second--particularly given that it was a paperback with a dopey title and a voluptuous woman on the cover. Thus, I could just never buy into that turn of events even for a second.

Despite that, I though the book was great anyway. Maybe I'm just not as sophisticated as those who almost snobbishly put down the writing in the book (or gave it backhanded compliments like calling it nice "light" reading or "summer" reading), but I thought that the writing was great, the characters were great, the book was fuuny, the dialogue was funny--in fact, except for the above problem, I liked everything about the book. It hooked me right from the get-go and didn't let go the whole way through. In short, I recommend it highly.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I found it VERY uneven:, June 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Man Who Wrote the Book (Hardcover)

OK for a light, very light, summer read; some very funny situations and dialogue; but then again, the sheer cuteness of much of it was embarrassing, and the implausibility, if that sort of thing bothers anyone anymore, was . . . incredible. I found myself irritatedly screaming at the protagonist through a couple of hundred pages: Just do the obvious, what's stopping you, why hang around a go-nowhere podunk small-minded college nursing an utterly hopeless tenure case if you've got the publishing world on a string? And why didn't the author, the real author that is, make some effort to flesh out, as in let us read, some of that phenomenal best-selling porn book the whole thing was all about? I mean, only one non-descript line was reported: Nora patted her hair into a perfectly concentric bun. Hmm . . . maybe he knows his limits?

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book, September 7, 2004

By 

Grant McLean (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Man Who Wrote the Book (Hardcover)

I enjoy a good laugh and this book made me laugh a lot. I saw some parallels with Grisham's 'The Rainmaker' - if you enjoyed that then you'll probably like this. Things start out bad for our hero and get worse as his world falls apart. Sure, some of the situations are barely credible, but that's the point and that's where the humour comes from.

If you're inclined to use condescending phrases like 'light summer read' or if you're likely to be offended by sexual references, you might be best to skip it.